It’s gardening season! Which means nearly every single day for the next three months, I will be doing this almost every day.
This is Gabe’s third year gardening. He’s pretttty much a pro (at getting water and dirt all over himself and stepping on plants).
This is our garden. The back is potatoes (!!), then basil and onions, then lettuce and a zucchini (I think?), then red peppers, then a bunch of tomato plants. It looks PATHETIC, right? You can see our neighbors’ garden to the right and it’s somehow growing like lush weeds. Except they have beans and tomatoes.
For the past few years, we’ve gone to Home Depot and just picked up some pretty sizable little plants to start our garden. I like things easy. Especially gardening. This year, however, I decided we’d stay local! And organic! And go to a plant sale run by some nuns. What we didn’t get there, we got from our (far less lazy than us) friends who grew heirloom tomato plants from seed.
The result is a puny looking garden with lots of heart.
Another change is that we’re using newspaper to keep weeding to a minimum. While it’s been incredibly effective and free (YAY), it’s also incredibly ugly.
Our soil is full of rocks (despite three years of picking them out of the garden bed) and the soil is decidedly clay-like and not so rich. The cards are stacked against us, you see? It’s not our fault our garden is ugly. And doing poorly.
To add to our garden woes, we have some sort of disease attacking my beloved little basil.
And the six lettuce plants we got are smaller now than when we bought them. I suspect some cute little bunny is enjoying our lettuce.
Oh, and something is eating our broccoli, too. WOE.
Good thing we’ve signed up for a CSA with Fresh Fork and have a farmers market just two blocks from our apartment. And if nothing else, I have a whole new level of respect for farmers.
The water droplets in the first picture are awesome!
Our garden the first year was fab—picking string beans every morning, proclaiming over the little eggplants. Then last year, the DEER found us—I assume it was deer. What else could have been coming to the garden each night (morning?) and eating up everything like it was a buffet table? Bummed, I gave up and everything just sort of went to pot. This year, I put up this special netting — so my garden is rather ugly too, LOL! But it’s keeping the deer away. It’ll be a pain once the veggies come in, cuz I haven’t figured out how I’m going to get in there to pick them, as I covered the place completely (to keep deer and rabbits out).
You know, I did newspaper too this year—I prob read it on your blog! But I put it down and then put like 2 bags of soil on top, so you can’t see the newspaper at all. Now I guess I did it wrong (?) because you can see your newspaper….? I thought to bury it to keep the weeds from growing up, but put the soil in so that the veg plants could put down roots. Who knows.
We buy plants from a local farm. I spent $20: 4 tomato, 2 cucumber, 1 eggplant, 1 green pepper, and 1 basil. The yellow squash plant from last year appears to have repopulated itself, so that’s my experiment there, leaving it to see what happens. And I also planted string beans from seed—and they’re already growing!
I hope some of your stuff comes in good in the end! Good luck!
Had I known of Gabe’s prowess with water and dirt, I would’ve brought our little metal shovels to the playground to let the boys dig for worms!
Hahaha- Gabe is also the cutest gardener ever. I am also attempting some veggies this year… but I accidentally planted them way too close together, which is probably going to be a problem later haha. Oops.
I had no idea that newspaper could keep the weeds to a minimum.
We have tons of clay like dirt at our house and this year we planted a bunch of plants and did some mulching because the clay was hideous (and we gave in to keep up with the Jones’ as everyone around us seems to NOT have clay dirt issues). So far the plants are growing well but we had some aphid issues. We have too many chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits and neighborhood cats (aka mean ones that fight in the middle of the night and wake us up) for us to attempt to grow anything food related. Here’s hoping your garden does a turn around at some point this summer for you =)